Title: Path planning for marine fleet using heuristic approach

Authors: Domenico Balestrieri; Giulia Vaccaro; Francesca Lancia; Roberto Pandolfi; Federica Pascucci

Addresses: Intecs S.p.A, Traffic Control Division, Salita del Poggio Laurentino, 7, 00144 Roma, Italy ' Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Via della Vasca Navale, 79, 00146 Roma, Italy ' Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Via della Vasca Navale, 79, 00146 Roma, Italy ' Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Via della Vasca Navale, 79, 00146 Roma, Italy ' Dipartimento di Ingegneria, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Via della Vasca Navale, 79, 00146 Roma, Italy

Abstract: Nowadays, the use of unmanned vehicles for border monitoring is taking over in order to reduce the effort of human operators. This paper addresses the problem of the coastal patrolling by proposing a solution based on unmanned underwater and surface vehicles. The focus of the work is on the design of the routes for the unmanned vehicles so as to optimise the limited mission range of the robotic platforms and to allow the re-visit of sensitive areas. A heuristic approach is proposed to compute the navigation plans: it includes a surface platoon to support the underwater vehicles in localisation and communication. The route-planning problem is cast into multiple travelling salesmen problem and solved by applying different heuristic methods for the patrolling mission and the support mission. The first one exploits simulated annealing, while the second one adopts the tabu search. Some promising results are presented, based on simulation.

Keywords: underwater patrolling; surface support; coastal patrols; optimisation; path planning; unmanned vehicles; robotic platforms; underwater robots; surface platoons; underwater vehicles; localisation; communication; seabourn patrols; marine fleets; route planning; multiple TSP; travelling salesmen problem; simulated annealing; tabu search; simulation; robot navigation; coastal security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSE.2013.057658

International Journal of System of Systems Engineering, 2013 Vol.4 No.3/4, pp.261 - 276

Received: 23 May 2013
Accepted: 03 Jul 2013
Published online: 28 Apr 2014 *

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